It turns out that when people say close down, they don’t really mean close down. They mean closing down “unnecessary” economic and social activities. “Unnecessary” is defined as any functions not required for basic social stability. Again, there was no existing blueprint, but when we started discussing the list of “basic” activities, the list actually got quite long. Society still had to be stable and functioning. Public transportation would need to continue. Grocery stores and pharmacies would need to remain open. Doctors’ offices and the health-care system would be essential. Delivery services, utility services, emergency home repair services, stores that sell home goods, police, firefighters, some government workers but not all. It was a substantial list.
Discussing the ramifications of the closures, I became deeply troubled. Talk about a tale of two cities: This would be a tale of two economies and two types of workers. The phrase for the employees of the basic services is “essential workers.” An essential worker may sound like a nice title, but it is really anything but glamorous. The essential workers are the structural framework for the service economy. They are the backbone of New York. They are the blue-collar working folks we too often take for granted. In New York City, they are not the fancy Manhattan residents or the Wall Street bankers. They are Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island residents, outer-borough Latino, Asian, Black. They are the hardworking, struggling families. Why is it that the poorest among us are always asked to pay the highest price? These are the people our society always seems to forget. They are working, so they are not on public assistance or Medicaid. But they are barely making it. The last national “disaster” was the 2007 housing collapse and mortgage fraud scandal, when these people lost the equity in their homes while the federal government bailed out the big banks with their tax dollars. I am from Queens. I grew up feeling that I was from a different class from the Manhattan elite. As attorney general, I had brought actions against companies like AIG and Bank of America, which took the federal bailout funds and paid million-dollar bonuses to the same executives who created the scandal in the first place. No one bailed out the working families in the outer boroughs who saw their home values depleted.
My father’s voice rang in my ears. The system was rigged. One set of rules for the rich and powerful and another set of rules for everyone else. Whatever the situation, it seems working families get the short end of the stick. The powerful institutions work together to protect themselves and their friends, and the government is their unwitting or, even worse, conscious ally.
But in many ways this situation would be more devastating than the Great Recession of 2008. This was not just about unfair economic gain or loss. We would be asking one group of workers to put their lives at risk so that another group, the “nonessential workers,” would be able to stay safe at home. It is a gross injustice and manifestation of the inequality in society. I couldn’t get past the feeling that this was just unfair.
How could I even explain this when the time came, and it seemed certain that it would soon. I would need to tell the people of the state that the situation was incredibly dangerous and would require drastic action that was without precedent. We would need to close down business and social activity because it was unsafe. However, essential workers still needed to go to work because we needed them to do their jobs. They would have to deal with the risk that they might get sick and bring the virus home to their families. There was no alternative. If the essential workers didn’t show up, there would be anarchy. Imagine a situation with no police, no food, no public transportation. What if I asked the essential workers to continue working and they determined it was too dangerous? The ethical, moral, and practical issues continued to multiply. I struggled with these questions night after night when I reviewed the decisions I’d made that day and considered the decisions that awaited me the next. I talked to any number of people, and everyone had a different opinion. In bed when the phone was finally silent, I would rerun the whole day one more time in my mind like a video replay. It came down to judgment calls about life and death, and every one of those calls could be second-guessed. The only certainty was that I had to make decisions now and move.
MARCH 16 | 294 NEW CASES | 158 HOSPITALIZED | 6 DEATHS
“When we say these facilities close down at 8:00 P.M. tonight, they will then remain closed until further notice.”
WE REACHED OUT TO THE governors of the surrounding states, most notably Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Ned Lamont of Connecticut, who joined me at the day’s briefing. Melissa spoke to their respective chiefs of staff numerous times a day, and I spoke with both men directly. It was helpful to have leaders from the neighboring states to bounce things off, because they were facing the
